The Murderbot Diaries, 2020

In 2020 Bill at Subterranean Press asked me to illustrate a new omnibus collecting all the extant "Murderbot" stories up to that point (Martha has just kept on and on and every one is solid gold). The OG covers for these stories by Jaime Jones are quiet, powerful, and perfectly capture the emotional space of the series. Bill felt we should go in another direction and asked for a lot of action; I was relieved because 1) I like to paint action, yet it's seldom my overall choice for a book cover, and 2) there's no competing with Jaime anyhow.

Once the sketches were approved I set myself incredibly short painting deadlines on each of the paintings, in order that their handling mirror Martha's brutal, succinct descriptions of action. I really wanted to have to struggle a bit, noticeably, to keep up - and struggle I did! In some cases, the paintings took as little as about eight hours (which at the time, for me, was quite fast), and afterwards I would just crash. To facilitate the look I wanted and the time constraints, texture stands in for detail in almost all cases.